Arbor press

Usually, I live over on the Neanderthal side of the Creek. I thought this may be of interest here, though. Back in my high school days I was a pretty handy machine guy. This is the arbor press I made in my senior year. It was one of two tools I had to make in order to make my teacher happy (getting an A, in other words). The other was a drill press vise. I believe I was the only one who ventured to make both that year, most of the other guys botched one or the other and never finished them. The rack and the handle are stainless. The body is all mild steel. The pinion, knobs, and end cap are brass. I dug it up off the shelf at my Dad's house a while back and cleaned it up. Still pretty proud of it.
Much of the layout was done with scribes and dye. We had to do all the math for the gears, no digital assistance on anything, save for the readout on the mill, which was not installed on all of our mills at that time.

Mark,

Nice work on the press. Do you have any pictures of the drill press vise?
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+1 on the press....good job ! You will always enjoy using tools you've made and this one is priemo!

Nicely done!

Thanks, guys! I got that tool making bug pretty young. It's the one vaccine I never got (thank goodness ;)).
Keith, the drill press vise lives at my Dad's place. I'll snap a picture of it when I'm there this afternoon.

Here's the drill press vise. You can see that it's been in service for several years. I've been thinking about sending it out for phosphate or CAD plating. I'll have to get a quote from one of the local vendors for that one of these days. At my job I have plenty of contacts for both and they welcome these small jobs. If I do, I'll have the press and vise done at the same time.
The dimensional tolerances required by my teacher at the time were very tight. More than .003" was a big no-no. .002" was what he considered good work, especially when you consider that some of the machines I used in school were the same that my Dad used (including welders). The lathe that I used to cut the threads on the vise was a 1936 South Bend! Awesome machine. We also ground all of our own tool bits, including the 60 degree thread bits.
A big motivation to keep the tolerance tight was that we paid for our materials. I worked for $40 a week when I was in high school...that vise was a week's pay, if I DIDN'T make any mistakes!

Mark,

I have drawings for a vise just like yours in an old drafting and design book. I have always wanted to make one with wooden parts to set on my desk, maybe I will drag that old book out of the bookshelf and give it another look.

Thanks for the pictures, the vise is a beauty.
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Originally Posted by Keith Outten

Mark,

I have drawings for a vise just like yours in an old drafting and design book. I have always wanted to make one with wooden parts to set on my desk, maybe I will drag that old book out of the bookshelf and give it another look.

Thanks for the pictures, the vise is a beauty.
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Thanks, Keith. A wooden version would be kind of neat. You'd have to come up with some insane explanation of why it's made out of wood just to confuse people, like: "it's for drilling unobtainium, being clamped in steel will cause it to spontaneously burst into flames" or something like that.